Sharing the truth about a "Slut" who needed birth control because of Rush Limbaugh's lies!
This post is going to end up pretty graphic and horrifying. I'm going to be opening up and revealing a lot here. If frank discussion of a woman's bodily processes disgusts or frightens you, please DO NOT read any further.
I am writing this post because of Rush Limbaugh. I'm writing this post because I am a woman and I am a woman who knows far better than that man ever will that he doesn't have the first clue what he's saying. He has declared that women who want prescription birth control pills are sluts, that the only reason that a woman could ever possibly want to use them is because she's a whore and wants to screw random men without fear of consequences. It's an ugly lie, and a damaging one.
Hearing his diatribe and his demand that the women who wanted birth control should send him their sex tapes brought back a whole host of horrible memories. Reading a story on dailykos about a mother having to try to help her 16 year-old daughter deal with some of the same things that I had to deal with was like a huge punch to the gut. That little girl shouldn't have to defend herself. I shouldn't, either, but I feel, honestly, that, as a grown woman who is a mature adult I have the words and the forum to share my story and, maybe, someone who needs to read it to know that they aren't alone will find it and it will help them. Maybe this post will find its way to someone who had never considered the issue from the female side of things, or maybe, it will find its way to people who not only need some enlightenment, but will benefit from reading it. I can always hope that.
I have to start this story when I was 13 years old. Like many other girls in junior high school, I had started getting my period. Unlike many other girls in junior high school, mine just never seemed to stop. I would have a day or two when I would stop bleeding and a few days that were light, but most of the time, I was having a full-blown period. That lasted for six full months. I had been to a very unsympathetic doctor who kept telling my mom that it wasn't that bad and she needed to give my adolescent hormones a chance to settle down. We did not have health insurance. Because of that single fact, this woman felt that it was her higher calling to ensure that she shuffled us completely off her radar and forced us to get inferior healthcare, regardless of the fact that my parents always paid their bills, in cash, on the day of service.
I knew that there was something wrong. Everything that I had ever read or seen about how a girl's body is supposed to develop said as much. Their helpful little bullet lists of signs that you needed to go to the doctor to get things checked out was the world's most horrifying checklist. Why? Because that was me. That was my body. That's what I was doing. It wasn't hypochondria, it was demonstrable issues on a regular basis.
The, one day, the seventh graders were herded into the gym to sit on the bleachers and watch the high schoolers put on the all-school play. While we sat there, I felt a deep-tissue muscular clench and then what felt like a thick, wet explosion force its way out of me. As I sat there, in the dark, I was mortified. I knew what had happened. I knew that there was blood and that it was everywhere. I felt a hot rush of shame. Somehow, I'd had the foresight to bring my jacket with me into the gym. When school was over, I quickly wrapped the jacket around my waist and ran out to catch the bus, but not before I saw the puddle of blood that had spread underneath me. I prayed that no one else saw it or that they wouldn't realize who had left it, but most of all, I mentally apologized to the school custodian, whom I knew was going to have to clean that disgusting, nasty mess off the bleachers.
The entire bus ride home, I prayed even more fervently that the mess that I knew was all over in my pants would not soak through my jacket. As soon as I got home, I went inside the front door and started crying and yelled for my mother. When she came running, I tearfully confessed to her “Mom-I made a mess.”
When she saw it, she thought that I was dying. I had blood from my waistband to my knees. The blue jeans that I had been wearing were a solid burgundy color. I ruined a t-shirt, a jacket, and my jeans that day. There was just too much blood for it to all come out in the wash. It was also painfully obvious from the state of my clothes that there was not a feminine hygiene product in the world designed to catch that.
We went back to the doctor for the eighth or ninth time in six months. My mother told the doctor what had happened. The woman very snidely suggested that, perhaps, I just needed to grow up and learn how to take better care of myself. She even suggested to my mother that she should make me wash out my own underwear so I'd learn not to let blood soak into them. “Let”-when I think back on it now, I understand that woman had no business as a doctor, especially not one dealing with other women. As if I had a choice about what had happened. Granted, she wasn't me and I couldn't expect her to be a telepath, but, surely she could see that if I had gotten a choice in the matter I would not have let that happen at school, especially not in my favorite jeans and shirt.
My mom demanded that the woman at least do a blood test to check and see if I was anemic. As it turned out, I was far more anemic than just being a normal teenaged girl could explain. All of the sudden, the doctor was forced to admit that, yes, I had a severe bleeding problem and it needed to be treated. Never mind that we had been telling her that for six months.
I was promptly put on a low dosage monthly cycle of birth control. It was like magic. The faucet had been turned off and I could function again. Now, here's the really funny part about this whole issue that Limbaugh seems to think he has some kind of say in, that dosage of birth control that I was taking WASN'T actually enough to keep me from getting pregnant. I repeat. The dosage was NOT high enough to KEEP me from getting pregnant. It was designed to help regulate hormone fluctuations so that the estrogen cycle could be regulated.
I was not dating anyone. I certainly wasn't sleeping with anyone. As far as that goes, I hadn't even kissed anyone. All that happened was that my body had started attacking me and there was a pill that could help fix that problem.
When my grandmother (to whom I no longer have any ties, we have not spoken in more than a year and, as far as I am concerned, we never will again) found out, she threw a fit. My own grandmother, who should have known me so much better than that, railed at my mother that she had raised such a little slut. She was angry because she didn't want a granddaughter who was a whore. Yes, you read that right. I am not using hyperbole, I'm not making this up, and I sure as hell am not embellishing this. As a matter of fact, I left a word out., she stated point blank to my mother, that no granddaughter of hers was going to be a dirty whore. What I haven't mentioned is that I was sitting on her living room couch, trying to watch TV. There were no doors between the kitchen, where she was saying this and me. She wasn't bothering to lower her voice or try to be quiet. She made sure that not only did my mother hear it, but that I heard every word that she said.
After about half an hour, I realized that my grandmother was not going to stop talking. I got up and walked out of the house. I know that both of the women in the kitchen heard the door shut. I went out and wandered through the alfalfa field on the property and cried. I didn't understand. Certainly, my thirteen year-old self couldn't reconcile my mom and the doctor saying that I needed to take these pills to make myself feel better and my grandma calling me filthy, awful things.
Eventually, I went to my mom's car and sat inside it and read the liner notes for “The Eagles Greatest Hits 1971-75” a couple dozen times. I felt so broken inside that the innate story-teller inside me, the one who always had characters and plot lines there for me, ripe for the picking, was, for the s first time since I'd recognized it, utterly silent. I'd cried all of the tears that I could cry. Mostly, I understood one thing. My grandmother hated me, and she hated me because of a little plastic clamshell that held 28 tiny little pills.
My mom was furious. I don't remember what was going on at the farm that day, but I knew that we had to stay. When it came time to move the hand-line irrigation system across the field, Mom didn't even come and get me. She got in the car with me that evening to drive me home and said, “I'm sorry. She's wrong. You have those pills because you need them so that this stops and you can get back to school.”
That was the last thing we said about it. Over the next several years, we tried several times to wean me off the pills. However, each time we discovered that if I stopped taking them I would start bleeding and I wouldn't stop. It was easier to explain to a new doctor after the very rude and extremely uncaring doctor retired.
I was on The Pill for 19 years. There is, in any way, shape, or form, any way that Rush Limbaugh's definition of “slut” fits me. His definition of “whore” doesn't, either. And, you know what? My grandmother's use of them was just as inaccurate.
I stopped taking The Pill because I had to have a hysterectomy. When my body rebelled against me for the final time, it was even worse than what had happened in junior high. My laundry basket looked like a horror movie and my bathroom wasn't much better. It came to a point where the blood loss was becoming life-threatening.
I'm not a whore, Limbaugh (and while I'm ordinarily a very polite young woman, you don't deserve to be called “Mr.”) and I'm not a slut. I didn't want prescription birth control pills, I had to take them because my body would not regulate itself properly.
When you have experienced, first hand, the grinding agony of your entire interior genital tract going through such severe muscle spasms that it doubles you over and drops you to the floor, we'll see how quick you are to talk about “sluts” and “whores”. When you cannot sit, stand, walk, crawl, sneeze, cough, laugh, or whimper without blood and tissue flooding down your pants to coat you from your belly button to your knees, then we'll see how unnecessary medication that could help you really is. Until you grow a uterus and vagina and experience the ailment first hand, and I do mean the entire experience of irregular, unpredictable, severe bleeding that includes excruciating cramps, then you do not have the right to weigh in with your opinion about my medical condition, or anyone else's for that matter.
I believe in Free Speech, and that means that I have to let you say the awful things that you spout so venomously from your rotted pulpit while you hide behind the shield of calling it your opinion every time someone calls it into question. But you know what else that means? That means that I get to have my say, too, and that I will be able to speak from first-hand experience. It means that I can stand up and tell my story. It also means that your worthless opinion can't hurt me. If my grandmother didn't destroy me when I was young and vulnerable, you sure as hell won't get the opportunity because I can see your flawed argument coming from a million miles away. And that's saying something. I have bad eyes.
I am writing this post because of Rush Limbaugh. I'm writing this post because I am a woman and I am a woman who knows far better than that man ever will that he doesn't have the first clue what he's saying. He has declared that women who want prescription birth control pills are sluts, that the only reason that a woman could ever possibly want to use them is because she's a whore and wants to screw random men without fear of consequences. It's an ugly lie, and a damaging one.
Hearing his diatribe and his demand that the women who wanted birth control should send him their sex tapes brought back a whole host of horrible memories. Reading a story on dailykos about a mother having to try to help her 16 year-old daughter deal with some of the same things that I had to deal with was like a huge punch to the gut. That little girl shouldn't have to defend herself. I shouldn't, either, but I feel, honestly, that, as a grown woman who is a mature adult I have the words and the forum to share my story and, maybe, someone who needs to read it to know that they aren't alone will find it and it will help them. Maybe this post will find its way to someone who had never considered the issue from the female side of things, or maybe, it will find its way to people who not only need some enlightenment, but will benefit from reading it. I can always hope that.
I have to start this story when I was 13 years old. Like many other girls in junior high school, I had started getting my period. Unlike many other girls in junior high school, mine just never seemed to stop. I would have a day or two when I would stop bleeding and a few days that were light, but most of the time, I was having a full-blown period. That lasted for six full months. I had been to a very unsympathetic doctor who kept telling my mom that it wasn't that bad and she needed to give my adolescent hormones a chance to settle down. We did not have health insurance. Because of that single fact, this woman felt that it was her higher calling to ensure that she shuffled us completely off her radar and forced us to get inferior healthcare, regardless of the fact that my parents always paid their bills, in cash, on the day of service.
I knew that there was something wrong. Everything that I had ever read or seen about how a girl's body is supposed to develop said as much. Their helpful little bullet lists of signs that you needed to go to the doctor to get things checked out was the world's most horrifying checklist. Why? Because that was me. That was my body. That's what I was doing. It wasn't hypochondria, it was demonstrable issues on a regular basis.
The, one day, the seventh graders were herded into the gym to sit on the bleachers and watch the high schoolers put on the all-school play. While we sat there, I felt a deep-tissue muscular clench and then what felt like a thick, wet explosion force its way out of me. As I sat there, in the dark, I was mortified. I knew what had happened. I knew that there was blood and that it was everywhere. I felt a hot rush of shame. Somehow, I'd had the foresight to bring my jacket with me into the gym. When school was over, I quickly wrapped the jacket around my waist and ran out to catch the bus, but not before I saw the puddle of blood that had spread underneath me. I prayed that no one else saw it or that they wouldn't realize who had left it, but most of all, I mentally apologized to the school custodian, whom I knew was going to have to clean that disgusting, nasty mess off the bleachers.
The entire bus ride home, I prayed even more fervently that the mess that I knew was all over in my pants would not soak through my jacket. As soon as I got home, I went inside the front door and started crying and yelled for my mother. When she came running, I tearfully confessed to her “Mom-I made a mess.”
When she saw it, she thought that I was dying. I had blood from my waistband to my knees. The blue jeans that I had been wearing were a solid burgundy color. I ruined a t-shirt, a jacket, and my jeans that day. There was just too much blood for it to all come out in the wash. It was also painfully obvious from the state of my clothes that there was not a feminine hygiene product in the world designed to catch that.
We went back to the doctor for the eighth or ninth time in six months. My mother told the doctor what had happened. The woman very snidely suggested that, perhaps, I just needed to grow up and learn how to take better care of myself. She even suggested to my mother that she should make me wash out my own underwear so I'd learn not to let blood soak into them. “Let”-when I think back on it now, I understand that woman had no business as a doctor, especially not one dealing with other women. As if I had a choice about what had happened. Granted, she wasn't me and I couldn't expect her to be a telepath, but, surely she could see that if I had gotten a choice in the matter I would not have let that happen at school, especially not in my favorite jeans and shirt.
My mom demanded that the woman at least do a blood test to check and see if I was anemic. As it turned out, I was far more anemic than just being a normal teenaged girl could explain. All of the sudden, the doctor was forced to admit that, yes, I had a severe bleeding problem and it needed to be treated. Never mind that we had been telling her that for six months.
I was promptly put on a low dosage monthly cycle of birth control. It was like magic. The faucet had been turned off and I could function again. Now, here's the really funny part about this whole issue that Limbaugh seems to think he has some kind of say in, that dosage of birth control that I was taking WASN'T actually enough to keep me from getting pregnant. I repeat. The dosage was NOT high enough to KEEP me from getting pregnant. It was designed to help regulate hormone fluctuations so that the estrogen cycle could be regulated.
I was not dating anyone. I certainly wasn't sleeping with anyone. As far as that goes, I hadn't even kissed anyone. All that happened was that my body had started attacking me and there was a pill that could help fix that problem.
When my grandmother (to whom I no longer have any ties, we have not spoken in more than a year and, as far as I am concerned, we never will again) found out, she threw a fit. My own grandmother, who should have known me so much better than that, railed at my mother that she had raised such a little slut. She was angry because she didn't want a granddaughter who was a whore. Yes, you read that right. I am not using hyperbole, I'm not making this up, and I sure as hell am not embellishing this. As a matter of fact, I left a word out., she stated point blank to my mother, that no granddaughter of hers was going to be a dirty whore. What I haven't mentioned is that I was sitting on her living room couch, trying to watch TV. There were no doors between the kitchen, where she was saying this and me. She wasn't bothering to lower her voice or try to be quiet. She made sure that not only did my mother hear it, but that I heard every word that she said.
After about half an hour, I realized that my grandmother was not going to stop talking. I got up and walked out of the house. I know that both of the women in the kitchen heard the door shut. I went out and wandered through the alfalfa field on the property and cried. I didn't understand. Certainly, my thirteen year-old self couldn't reconcile my mom and the doctor saying that I needed to take these pills to make myself feel better and my grandma calling me filthy, awful things.
Eventually, I went to my mom's car and sat inside it and read the liner notes for “The Eagles Greatest Hits 1971-75” a couple dozen times. I felt so broken inside that the innate story-teller inside me, the one who always had characters and plot lines there for me, ripe for the picking, was, for the s first time since I'd recognized it, utterly silent. I'd cried all of the tears that I could cry. Mostly, I understood one thing. My grandmother hated me, and she hated me because of a little plastic clamshell that held 28 tiny little pills.
My mom was furious. I don't remember what was going on at the farm that day, but I knew that we had to stay. When it came time to move the hand-line irrigation system across the field, Mom didn't even come and get me. She got in the car with me that evening to drive me home and said, “I'm sorry. She's wrong. You have those pills because you need them so that this stops and you can get back to school.”
That was the last thing we said about it. Over the next several years, we tried several times to wean me off the pills. However, each time we discovered that if I stopped taking them I would start bleeding and I wouldn't stop. It was easier to explain to a new doctor after the very rude and extremely uncaring doctor retired.
I was on The Pill for 19 years. There is, in any way, shape, or form, any way that Rush Limbaugh's definition of “slut” fits me. His definition of “whore” doesn't, either. And, you know what? My grandmother's use of them was just as inaccurate.
I stopped taking The Pill because I had to have a hysterectomy. When my body rebelled against me for the final time, it was even worse than what had happened in junior high. My laundry basket looked like a horror movie and my bathroom wasn't much better. It came to a point where the blood loss was becoming life-threatening.
I'm not a whore, Limbaugh (and while I'm ordinarily a very polite young woman, you don't deserve to be called “Mr.”) and I'm not a slut. I didn't want prescription birth control pills, I had to take them because my body would not regulate itself properly.
When you have experienced, first hand, the grinding agony of your entire interior genital tract going through such severe muscle spasms that it doubles you over and drops you to the floor, we'll see how quick you are to talk about “sluts” and “whores”. When you cannot sit, stand, walk, crawl, sneeze, cough, laugh, or whimper without blood and tissue flooding down your pants to coat you from your belly button to your knees, then we'll see how unnecessary medication that could help you really is. Until you grow a uterus and vagina and experience the ailment first hand, and I do mean the entire experience of irregular, unpredictable, severe bleeding that includes excruciating cramps, then you do not have the right to weigh in with your opinion about my medical condition, or anyone else's for that matter.
I believe in Free Speech, and that means that I have to let you say the awful things that you spout so venomously from your rotted pulpit while you hide behind the shield of calling it your opinion every time someone calls it into question. But you know what else that means? That means that I get to have my say, too, and that I will be able to speak from first-hand experience. It means that I can stand up and tell my story. It also means that your worthless opinion can't hurt me. If my grandmother didn't destroy me when I was young and vulnerable, you sure as hell won't get the opportunity because I can see your flawed argument coming from a million miles away. And that's saying something. I have bad eyes.